Trip Ziggurat

Muhammad and Jane

Muhammad Zeromski, raised in Iraq and Poland, returns to the U.S. after being away for almost a year. The climate he enters is ominous and confused. He meets a woman who calls herself Jane Doe. They share a common fear and are drawn to one another through their paranoia.

Nice Bombs

In Nice Bombs filmmaker Usama Alshaibi returns to Baghdad to reunite with his family after nearly 24 years. This documentary navigates through his unique relationship to an Iraq that is much different than the country of his childhood.

Profane

A young Muslim Dominatrix in the midst of a spiritual crisis.

Allahu Akbar

Rhythm and repetition plays an important role in the animated film Allahu Akbar by Usama Alshaibi. With this film, Alshaibi questions the confrontation between tradition and modernity by drawing inspiration from geometric motives of Islamic art. The artist offers a re-interpretation of these motifs through computer animation. By turning the shapes in different direction, new images are generated, freeing them from their fixed state. Traditional spiritual values feed the present and open up to a modern perspective.

Convulsion Expulsion

An adventure in pornographic surrealism.

The Amateurs

What is preventing these people from completing video penetration?

Slaughtered Pigtails

A woman is chased across a field by an unseen assailant.

Filmmakers Unite (FU)

Soak

Formally, an intriguing depiction of video as forward motion, or as technology of road movies and dreams. Alshaibi intercuts footage of a Southeastern Asian trip with a young man’s venereal disease-influenced fantasies of a strange young woman.

The Desire

A devotion to beauty, aching and isolation.

American Arab

Iraqi-American filmmaker Usama Alshaibi shares his own story of experiencing racism in post-9/11 America. Showcasing the diversity of Arabs living in the United States, "American Arab" sparks a frank conversation about identity and perception, and argues for giving people "the space to be complicated."

Anxiety Art

A young artist in a dark dorm room takes anxieties out of their brain and into their hands.

Organ Molly

Usama Alshaibi-directed short film.

Portrait

Study of a schizophrenic girl in her own language.

Crying

Close-up of a woman crying.

Muffin

An eerily stylized deconstruction of exploitation and violence in life and cinema.